And so we turn the page to Valentine’s Day at Cidercade.
From a social standpoint, I did make more small talk than I usually do, but no strong connections. From a pinball and arcade gaming standpoint, I’d say the night went rather well. This evening brought my first games on Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye as well as Metallica Remastered. On both of these I feel like I put up some good scores (301M+ and 78.3M+ respectively). Additional highlights include 106M+ on Black Knight: Sword of Rage (Pro), 126k+ on Pepper II, and 3.16M+ on The Beatles. The others I can take or leave for the most part.
I had time to drop by both Poison Girl and Little Dipper on this particular evening. The main highlight of the trip would have to be the 2.83M+ on Quicksilver. Actually, spoiler alert, it might well be the highlight of the entire month of February. Most of the other scores weren’t all that great save for Earthshaker at Poison Girl, which I am slowly relearning as time allows.
We wrap up the month of January with another quick trip by Little Dipper and a longer visit to Cidercade to finish off the day.
The main highlight of the Little Dipper visit was the 1.02M+ on Quicksilver. It was at this point I finally felt like I was on the way to mastering this very fun and exciting game from 1980.
Moving on to Cidercade, I got to play the new Metallica Remastered machine which had recently arrived, though admittedly my score wasn’t all that great. Other highlights include 3.66M+ on Heavy Metal, 321.3M+ on Black Knight Sword of Rage (Pro, no upper playfield), 210.7M+ on Star Wars including R2-D2 champion, 113,970 on Pepper II, and 40,048 on Centipede (3 lives/12k).
This is not a post I wanted to write. Early Friday morning (2/7) the computer I usually use to edit blog posts has developed an issue where it will not stay running. It is either power supply or cooling related.
It will likely be quite a few days before I’m able to diagnose and fix it. In the meantime I may have sporadic access to another computer to post from. (The images require editing which is difficult to impossible from a phone.) I hope to be back to normal by the 16th (a week from Monday).
Update 2025-02-11: Computer’s back up and running, I should be back to normal updates within a day or two.
Cidercade (Houston location is at 2320 Canal Street) announced the Valentine’s Day Stoplight parties for all locations. I attended this event in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and I am looking forward to an even better event in 2025.
Tickets are available here on Eventbrite for the Houston event. (You will have to search for the others if you are closer to location outside of Houston.) As I write this, tickets are selling quickly (and we’re not even in February yet). I will be there, and hopefully I’ll get to meet a few of you.
This past Saturday brought another trip over to Star Pizza. As part of an outing with some friends, I indulged in some pizza and breadsticks, and then headed over to the pinball machines to get in a couple of games on the Dolly Parton pinball. (I only had $1.50, so it was either three games on Dolly Parton, two on Monster Bash, or one of each with 25¢ left over. I chose the first option.)
I had at least one decent game with a score of 198k+, with the others not coming anywhere close.
Next up was Einstein’s. Nothing all that out of the ordinary here, though the 4.33B+ on Attack from Mars was the best I have done in a while, and the 678k+ on Total Nuclear Annihilation was good enough for a replay.
